


hallow small things

by elumish



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Amnesia, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Episode: s01e19 The Only Light in the Darkness, Gen, Iron Man 3, Kid Fic, Kidnapping, M/M, Parental Clint Barton, Post-Avengers (2012), Presumed Dead, of sorts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-02-17 01:20:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13066164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elumish/pseuds/elumish
Summary: Annie watches the destruction of Manhattan on her cellphone. BBC livestreams it—well, everyone livestreams it, but fuck politicized American media—and she sits in her locked down classroom and ignores her teacher and stares at the video of the invasion of New York City.





	1. моя Птичка

**Author's Note:**

> This is meant to fit within canon, more or less (other than the last chapter).

Annie watches the destruction of Manhattan on her cellphone. BBC livestreams it—well, everyone livestreams it, but fuck politicized American media—and she sits in her locked down classroom and ignores her teacher and stares at the video of the invasion of New York City.

When she sees Captain America on the ground, evacuating civilians, she starts to cry.

She goes home, and nobody comes for her for two days, which isn’t exactly out of the ordinary post-shit happening; the longest it took Dad to come home was eighteen days, and he always makes sure her card has enough money for food and stuff, so it’s fine. What is out of the ordinary, though, is that she has no word, no notification, not even the automatic text she gets daily when her dad is on-mission.

She goes to school, though, and does her homework, and keeps acting like things are normal, because she has no real proof that they’re not. And even if she did, she only has the Super Emergency Only If You’re Dying phone, and considering that she’s not actually dying, she’s not going to risk using it.

No matter how much the back of her neck is prickling and she has that feeling her dad calls One Good Eye On Your Back.

On day three, she comes home to the rock near the door in the wrong place, and she sets her backpack down and draws the gun from under the porch swing before unlocking the door and entering. The living room is clear, but she hears a rustling from the kitchen and turns the corner with her gun stabilized and leveled.

“Turn around,” she tells the person rifling through her fridge. “Slowly.”

The person’s hands go up, and they straighten, turning as they go. “I’d rather you not shoot me,” Tasha says, stepping forward and closing the fridge door behind her.

Annie stares at her for a second, shocked, because Tasha has never shown up unannounced before, and has only been in the house twice that Annie knows of, both times with Dad and both times looking damn uncomfortable. And then she lowers her gun, flicking the safety back on before she sets it down on the counter near her. “What are you doing here?” she demands, then asks the more important question of, “Where’s Dad?”

Tasha’s expression darkens, her lips thinning. “I’m sorry it took so long to come for you; neither of us realized—” She shakes her head. “I’m not doing this right. I need you to come with me, kiddo.”

“Why?” Something catches in her throat, and she presses a fist against her mouth. “Where’s Dad?”

“I’m sorry,” Tasha says, and takes a step towards her.

Annie steps back, back through the doorway. She kind of wants her gun back. “No. No, you’re wrong. I would know.”

“I’m sorry.”

Anna swallows. “I want to see his body. I need to see his body.”

Tasha’s expression closes up. “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

“Because he’s not dead, right?”

“Anastasia—”

“ _No_.” She steps backwards into something, then stumbles, and before she can fall she’s in Tasha’s arms, sobbing, because her dad isn’t dead, can’t be dead, but if he was alive it wouldn’t be Tasha in her house after two days of radio silence, apologizing and calling her a name nobody has called her since Dad explained why her mom was never coming back.

Tasha pushes back her hair, then tilts her head back to Annie has to look at her. “We have to go, kiddo. I don’t know who’s coming for you, or when, and I’m not leaving you unprotected.”

“I’ve done it before.” Annie pulls away from her, rubbing her hands against her arms. “Where’s Clint? Why isn’t Clint here? Is he hurt? Did he get hurt with Dad?”

“Something got into Clint’s brain, and they need to make sure it’s out.” She looks around. “I see you’re keeping the place clean. You got a go bag packed?”

Annie nods. “Of course.”

“Go grab it and anything else you might need for the immediate time being. We can buy you anything else you need once you get settled.”

Annie scrubs a hand across her face. “Which is going to be where, exactly?”

“Grab your stuff and be back in five.”

Annie’s back in three, because she’s been trained for evacuation protocols and has everything she needs in her backpack and her go bag. Tasha is examining a photo, one of her and Clint and Annie and Dad, one that Dad keeps locked in his home desk because that was the only safe place to keep it. It’s one of the only photos of Annie and Dad that exists anywhere.

Tasha pockets it, then says, “Once we settle logistics, one of us will bring you back here to deal with what needs to be dealt with. Come on.”

They end up in Tasha’s sports car, which probably stands out a bit more than it should in Palisades Park, but she’s driven it to Dad’s house before, so the neighbors probably won’t care. Annie doesn’t really pay attention to where they’re going, so it’s not until they get on the Washington Bridge that she blurts out, “We’re going into the city? Isn’t most of it a smoking hole in the ground? Is that really where they stuck the Helicarrier?”

“Not where we’re going,” Tasha tells her, slipping in between an SUV and a slow-moving Hyundai.

“Which is?”

“Against my better judgment, Stark Tower.”

Annie blinks at her, genuinely surprised. That’s not even remotely what she had expected Tasha to say. “That’s—” She realizes something, and puts her hand against her mouth, partly so she doesn’t throw up. “He was fighting with the Avengers, wasn’t he? Or their handler. Your handler. That’s where he died. I—I was watching the footage, but I didn’t see—not that I would ever see him. His job is not to be seen.”

Without taking her eyes off the road, Tasha reaches over and touches Annie’s cheek, brushing a lock of hair back behind her ear. “He died earlier, before the attack. His death helped bring the team together.”

“Who called it, then, if he wasn’t calling the op?”

She sees Tasha smile sharply. “Steve Rogers.”

Annie puts her head in her hands, starting to laugh. It hurts, a little. “Dad missed Captain America calling a mission? He would’ve hated that.” She feels wetness on her hands and realizes that she’s crying, sobs wracking her body until she can barely breathe. Her dad is dead, and she has nobody.

Tasha parks in some underground parking garage under Stark Tower, or near it, and Annie doesn’t even realize they’re there when the car comes to a stop because the entirety of Manhattan has been stop-and-go traffic and streets lined with debris. But then Tasha is opening her door and climbing out, and Annie picks her head up and blinks at the dark parking garage.

A second later, her door opens, and Tasha says, “Come on, out.”

Annie unfolds herself and stumbles out of the car; she tries to pull her go bag away from Tasha, but Tasha holds it away from her, holding her backpack out instead. Annie pulls it over her shoulders, securing it quickly.

The elevator they get in is marked Private, and as soon as the door shut a soothing yet disembodied voice says, “Agent Romanoff, please identify your companion.”

“Anastasia Park,” Tasha says. “I can vouch for her loyalty.”

“Welcome to Stark Tower, Miss Park,” the voice says.

“Where is Stark?” Tasha asks.

“Floor sixty-three,” the voice reports. “Would you like me to take you there now?”

“Please.”

The elevator starts moving, and Annie looks over at Tasha. She looks totally calm, hand relaxed on the handle over Annie’s go bag, but Annie has seen that look in her eyes before, and Clint’s, and Dad’s. She’s about five minutes away from hurting someone, or herself.

It makes Annie relax. There are three people in the world who would kill for her, or die for her, and Tasha is one of them.

Two, now.

Shit.

The door opens to an open, bright room, full of massive windows and one very large tarp that’s rustling loudly in the wind. The floor looks like it’s been smashed with the world’s largest hammer and then beaten to a pulp.

Tony fucking Stark stands next to the broken part of the floor, glass of what is almost definitely alcohol in one hand; his head snaps up when the doors open, and he demands, “Tell me that isn’t a little Romanoff.”

Tasha steps out of the room and towards Stark, who holds his glass out like a cross warding off a vampire. “No, she isn’t my child.”

He peers around her at Annie, who clutches at the strap of her backpack. “Then what’s with the mini-me? Or, well, not that she really looks like you, but—I have a no under-eighteen rule in my Tower.”

Tasha presses her lips together, and then she says, “She needs protection. Your protection.”

“I’m a little too busy—not to mention, well, _me_ —to look after a kid. No matter how good a kid you probably are. No offense, whatever your name is.”

“None taken,” Annie says. She’s still standing in the elevator, but the door hasn’t closed yet. It’s not eve beeping at her.

Tasha hesitates, shoulder stiff, before saying, “She’s Phil Coulson’s daughter.”

Stark bobbles the glass, almost dropping it, then blurts out, “Agent has a kid? I thought he had a—a cellist in Portland. Not that you can’t have a kid and a—person.”

“I play violin,” Annie tells him, feeling a bit awkward about the whole thing. Nobody knows about her, or nobody did, not except Clint and Tasha. “And I was born in Portland, Maine. The cellist in Portland thing was—it was code, for people that he—that he liked.”

Stark pales, before taking a long drink from his glass. When he finally surfaces, he says, “She got a mom, or something? Whatever kids have? Anyone going to be looking for her, or after her?”

“I have school,” Annie says at the same time Tasha says, “No.”

“Okay, then.” Stark claps his hands, or does so as best as he can with one hand holding a glass. “I’ll give you a pick of the remodeled and not totally destroyed floors, and we can go from there. Mi casa is Agent’s kid’s casa. Just tell me, does she need to be adopted or something? Because that’s not happening. I’m not—that doesn’t count as protection. Believe me.”

“No,” Tasha says again.

“Great. Well, I have work to do, so I’m going to go…do work.” Stark strides around Tasha and into the elevator, where he glances at Annie, who’s still standing in it. “Is there some reason you’re still here? In my elevator?”

“I—” Annie blinks at him. She wants a gun, she thinks, or a hug, or maybe to cry until the big dark horrid thing inside of her has all washed away. What comes out of her mouth instead is, “Can I see your lab?”

“Can you—sure, sure, yes, why not, teenagers love robots. Romanoff, you with us?”

Tasha glances at Annie, then walks back into the elevator; she inserts herself between Stark and Annie like she thinks Stark is a threat, which would be hilarious if Annie wasn’t half a step away from hysterical. She feels like that feeling when your earbuds are tangled up and you’re trying to pick them apart and they’re just getting worse and like when her dad came home with electrical burns and like someone sucked all of the blood out of her and replaced it with acid, and the protocols for this always involved Clint and Tasha and a safehouse halfway across the country, but the world is different now and she doesn’t know where Clint is, and her dad was never really supposed to die.

“When did Agent get a kid?” Stark asks somewhere around the 30th floor. “I mean she looks…teenager-shaped, but she could have been grown in a lab a month ago for all I know.”

“I’m sixteen,” Annie tells him, because she doesn’t think that’s secret, not if her dad isn’t secret.

Stark whistles. “Agent must have been, what, twenty-five then? Never thought he had it in him. I—” The elevator stops and the door opens, and this is a lobby, not a lab, and a red-haired woman Annie belatedly recognizes as Pepper Potts is standing in front of the doorway, looking down at a file. “Pepper.”

Potts picks her head up, then does a double take when her eyes settle on Annie; she glances at Stark a second later, saying, “Please tell me you and Agent Romanoff didn’t kidnap a teenager.”

“I was the cellist,” Annie says then, realizing from the horrified look on Pott’s face how that sounded, clarifies, “I wasn’t sleeping with, uh, Phil. Coulson.”

“Agent had a secret love child,” Stark announces.

Potts blinks at him, then at Annie, then says, “Oh. I’m—I’m sorry for your loss.”

Tasha looks at Potts, with the You’ll Do What I Want And Think It’s Your Idea look on her face. “There’s nowhere else for her to go and nobody else Phil would have trusted to keep her safe.”

“I’m flattered,” Potts says, and steps into the elevator. The doors close, and it starts moving again. “But are you sure this is really the best place for a teenage girl? Not that we don’t have space, but, well, Tony isn’t really known for his ability to deal with people, and I’m rarely here.”

“I can take care of myself,” Annie tells her, then switches to Russian to ask Tasha, “Why am I not just going to the safehouse with Laura and the other kids?”

Tasha glances at her. “Laura was supposed to be temporary, until Clint or I could extract you. Given the state of the world, I couldn’t guarantee an extraction or even visitation. Stark is unreliable, but he takes care of those he considers his own.”

Stark clears his throat. “I do speak Russian, you know,” he tells them cheerfully. “Weapons builder during the Cold War and all that jazz.” In Russian, he tells them, “I’ll take care of mini-Agent, don’t worry. It’s the least I owe him.”

“I, at least, don’t speak Russian,” Potts tells the elevator as a whole, “and I would appreciate you sticking to English.” The elevator stops, and the doors open to a lab filled with a shit ton of cool lab stuff and a robot standing right in front of the elevator doors. Potts lets out a small shriek.

Stark just laughs, though, and heads out of the elevator, corralling the robot back as he goes. “C’mon DUM-E. Jesus, what are you doing, trying to give me a heart attack? I have a heart condition, you know, and being scared to death is not helpful. Look, can you just—make me a smoothie or something, I don’t care, and no, U, leave the squishy human alone, she doesn’t want to deal with you.”

Annie blinks down at the robot nudging her leg, then follows it out of the elevator and into the lab. Stark seems to have already mostly forgotten she’s there, pulling up a glowing blue hologram and swiping parts of it out of the way. It looks like a 3D blueprint of the tower, with separate floors that disappear when he pushes them to the side.

Tasha’s hand lands on her shoulder, and when Annie looks at her she says, “Be good, моя Птичка. I’ll be back when I can.”

Annie nods, and then the elevator door closes and Annie is alone with Stark.

Tasha left the go bag on the floor next to her, so she picks it up and carries it over into the main part of the lab. The robot trails after her, nudging her slightly when she stops off to the side of the room. It’s a massive lab, filled with stuff, and Stark seems to be doing about twelve things at the same time.

“You didn’t have to say yes,” Annie tells him, because she can’t think of anything else to say, and the throbbing aching mass in her chest is working its way up to coil around her windpipe.

Stark startles, dropping a wrench; after a second, he turns and looks at her. After a second of examining her, he says, “Phil Coulson was a friend, or as much of one as I have from someone who isn’t Pepper or Rhodey. Now I can’t give him a memorial service, and I can’t build him a statue, and I can’t go with my original plan which was to throw some money at his cellist. So I can let you live in my tower. Whatever. I probably won’t even notice you’re here.” He picks the wrench back up. “So, you like science? Engineering? Building shit?”

Annie snorts. “My physics teacher told me to never build a bridge. Believe me, this—” She waves her hand to encompass the room as a whole. “Is not my strong suit.”

“What do you like, then?”

“Math. Violin. Ice skating.” Her dad had played hockey in college, and they went skating every weekend he was around. “Planning stuff, making it work. My dad always said—” She breaks off, throat closing around the words. “He always said good paperwork could fix anything except bad planning.”

Stark eyes her for a second, then turns away, fiddling with something on the table. “Yeah, sounds like Agent. Anyway, hang around, do whatever, just don’t drink anything DUM-E gives you. He’s still learning to distinguish between motor oil and…food.”

Annie watches him wander around doing whatever, then sits down on the battered couch shoved in the corner of the room. She puts her backpack down at the foot of the couch, her go bag with it, both of them as out of the way as she can get them. Her dad always told him to keep stuff neat and out of the way; in case of emergency, you don’t want to be tripping over your own shit.

Somewhere in between the dark angry mass wrapping its way around her throat and climbing its way into her mouth, she presses her back against the wall and falls asleep.

\--

Annie wakes up to eyes on her.

She considers pretending to surface slowly, but the ruse doesn’t necessarily seem useful, so she just opens her eyes; the man in front of her jerks away, clearly startled, and says, “Sorry, I was just—you look a little…young, for Tony’s type.”

Annie blinks at him; he’s shaggy-haired and sad-looking, but with a look about him that that says he’s five seconds from bolting. Clint gets the same look after nightmares, sometimes. She knows who he is. “I’m not Tony Stark’s girlfriend, Mr. Banner.”

He jerks away again, this time like she put a pin to him., and she sits up. She doesn’t think he’s going to do anything, but he was also in her Dad’s briefing of people to be careful of, so she’d like to be ready. Particularly because she’s weaponless. Finally, he asks, “How do you know who I am?”

“I’m not a threat to you or anyone else,” she reassures him.

“Forgive me if I find that hard to believe.”

“Miss Park will be living in the Tower for the time being,” the disembodied voice says from everywhere, “as per Sir’s orders.”

“Huh.” Banner moves away, stretching a bit, and says, “Sorry, didn’t mean to hover or freak you out. Just wasn’t expecting to see a teenager in Tony’s lab.”

Annie nods. “I wasn’t expecting to fall asleep here. What time is it?”

“It’s about six in the morning,” Banner says. “I was actually looking for Tony, but then I was going to make breakfast. I’m not sure if you have anything to do, but do you want anything?”

Annie stands up, grabbing her stuff and putting her backpack on. Banner looks like he wants to offer to carry her go bag for her, but he doesn’t. “I can cook for myself, if you don’t want to bother.”

Banner shakes his head. “Oh, no, it’s easier to cook for more people. I mean I understand if you don’t—I won’t be offended if you want to cook for yourself. But I’m going to be cooking anyway, and…” He trails off, looking uncomfortable.

Annie smiles. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

They take the elevator up a few dozen floors, with Banner instructing the elevator that the want to go to the Avengers kitchen, and she forces herself to stay loose and relaxed despite the fact that she’s in a small enclosed space with the most dangerous man in the world. No matter his shaggy exterior and apologetic demeanor.

He glances at her a couple of times during the ride, then finally says, “It’s none of my business, but are you Tony’s secret love child or something? I can’t imagine why else he’d be housing a teenager, especially this soon after the battle.”

Annie laughs, even as he chest aches. “I can guarantee you, I am not even remotely related to Tony Stark. It’s a—a favor, I guess.”

Banner examines her for a second, then shrugs. “Fair enough.”

The elevator stops then, with the doors opening to the sound of humming. The area immediately in front of the elevator is just a lobby, but immediately around the corner is the nicest kitchen Annie has ever seen, and in it, cooking what looks like an entire carton-worth of eggs, is a shirtless Captain fucking America.

“Oh my God,” she says at the same time Captain America says, “Shit.”

And then Annie is laughing, or sobbing, because Captain America is cooking eggs shirtless in Tony Stark’s kitchen, and her dad would have loved this, or hated it, and he was going to meet Captain America soon, he thought, and she doesn’t even know if he ever got to meet him, and what if he died without ever meeting Captain America, but Annie gets to meet him, now. What if Captain America never got to see how good her dad was, how great.

Near her, Captain America says, “Shit,” again, quieter, then asks, “Are you okay?”

Annie walks over to a nearby chair and drops down in it, sideways so her backpack doesn’t hit the back; she shoves her face in her hands and sobs, just sobs now, no laughter in sight. Her dad is dead, and she doesn’t want Captain America if she could have her dad back instead.

Her dad would laugh if he heard her say that.

A big, warm hand settles on her shoulder, and she barely restrains a twitch.

“I’m sorry,” Captain America says. “I can—if I’m making you uncomfortable, I can go.”

Dad would never forgive her if she kicked Captain America out of anywhere, so she picks her head up and wipes away the tears. Everything aches like she just got out of the sparring rink with Tasha, but she doesn’t want to show it, so she forces a smile. “No, sorry, I’m okay.” She glances over at the stove. “I hope I didn’t ruin your eggs.”

Captain America blinks at her with his long, long eyelashes. “No, I…moved them off the heat.” He walks around her to crouch down in front of her, close but far enough away to not brush against her accidentally. Standard talking to a victim without crowding them. Annie sucks in a deep, shuddering breath. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

There’s the instinctive flinch that she has, that everything about Dad is a secret, that she can’t talk about him, but Dad is dead, and this is Captain America. So she lets out a breath and says, “You were my dad’s hero.” Captain America’s expression shifts, cools a little like he’s heard that too many times. “He was SHIELD—he was hoping he was going to get to meet you. I don’t know if he got to.”

The Captain’s eyebrows arch. “Is it taking part in the clean-up right now? I’ll be out there again this afternoon.”

“No.” The word catches in her throat, and she pulls her knees up to her chest. It puts off of balance, a little, with the backpack, but Clint taught her how to balance on ceiling support beams, and she’s not going to fall off of a chair. “No, my dad’s dead. In the battle, I think.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Annie slips her backpack off of her shoulders, setting it on the floor, and presses her side against the side of the chair. “I couldn’t know a lot about his job, so I don’t know what he was doing. He was a handler, a senior agent, but there were—I don’t know how many senior agents there were.”

“What was his name?”

“Uh.” Annie rubs a hand across her mouth. She can say this. He’s Captain America. And Tasha brought her here, and Tony Stark knows, and she can say it. “Phil Coulson.”

Captain America reels back, falling on his heels, and Banner makes a startled noise behind her. “Agent Coulson?” Captain America asks. He looks stricken. “I—yes, I met him.”

“Good.” The ache in her chest eases a little. “Good. He—he would have liked that.” She wipes the tears from her eyes. She turns in the chair to look at Banner, who’s watching her with an apologetic look on his face. “I think I’ll eat later, Dr. Banner, but thank you for your offer.” And then she stands up, picks up her stuff, and walks back to the elevator.

\--

The house AI leads her to a suite of rooms, and she locks herself in the bedroom and curls up on the bed and cries.

Everyone in the tower basically forgets about her, which suits her just fine; she heads to the kitchen only after making sure nobody is there, and otherwise she sits in her room and—for some reason—does her homework and avoids all coverage of the battle.

The Battle of New York, they’re calling it in international news, or The Incident.

Maybe she’s not doing so well at avoiding coverage.

She’s not even sure which of the Avengers are around, though she’s seen stuff about Captain America helping with the clean-up effort in Manhattan, and she figures he’s probably still living in the Tower, at least for the time being. Stark lives there so he’s probably, well, living there. Banner, she has no idea.

It’s five days later when the house AI says, “Miss Park, would you please go to the communal kitchen on floor sixty-one at your earliest convenience?”

Annie hesitates, but she doesn’t think the house AI would request it for no reason, so she shoves her hair up into a rough ponytail, puts on her sneakers, and heads to the elevator. She needs to find a gym soon, once everything is less of a fucking disaster, so she doesn’t get completely out of shape. Doing push-ups in the room only does so much.

She’s not sure what to expect when the door opens to the kitchen, but Clint standing in the lobby, staring out a window, is not it. She doesn’t even notice if there’s anyone else in the room, because all she can see is him. Captain America could be doing naked push-ups nearby, and she would still scream, “Clint,” and throw herself at him.

He turns and catches her, wrapping his arms around her, and she buries her face in his chest and sobs. He presses his lips to her forehead and just holds her as she cries, and he smells like diesel and Clint and home. He’s been like a second dad for almost her whole life, for basically as long as she can remember, and she knows Dad and Tasha and her are the only people he has, and she feels so lost, like she’s been picked up by the wind and just keeps floating around and she can’t find her way back down. And his arms around her are an anchor, pulling her back down to the ground, and she doesn’t know what she’s going to do, she doesn’t know what she’s going to do without Dad.

“I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry” she realizes he’s saying, over and over into her hair, and she holds on tighter, pressing her face into the wet spot in his shirt.

An unexpected voice saying, “This is not what I expected,” startles her so badly she pulls one of the knives Clint’s back and only doesn’t throw it because Clint grabs her wrist and twists her around behind him.

When she peeks out from behind him, she sees Tony Stark standing in front of the elevator, staring at them. After a second, Clint eases up on the tension, saying, “Might be better not to sneak up on the assassin.”

“Yeah, well, I assumed the assassin would hear me coming.”

“It’s Hawkeye,” Clint says, “not Hawkears.” He turns to glance back at Annie. “Want to give me that knife back, baby, or are you planning on throwing it at him?”

“Anyone who stabs me doesn’t get to live with me,” Stark puts in even as Annie slips the knife back into the holster under Clint’s shirt. “Also, you call her baby?”

Clint sighs. “Don’t make this creepy.”

“I make everything creepy. That’s my job.” Stark shakes his head. “Was she your little assassin love baby with Agent?”

Clint flinches, and Annie presses her forehead against his back. “I need to know if she can stay,” is all Clint says, though. His voice is steady, but Annie can feel the trembling of his body where she’s pressed up against him. Or maybe she’s the one who’s trembling.

Stark makes an irritated, dismissive noise, then says, “I already said she could stay, didn’t I? It’s not like I don’t have enough space, and who knows, maybe one day I’ll need my own child assassin.”

“She’s not an assassin,” Clint snaps.

“No, right, she’s a little mini-Agent, complete with love for paperwork. Seriously, she can stay. I won’t be around much, because, you know, I’m me, but it’s not like I’d be a good role model, so it all works out.” Stark laughs. “You’re welcome to join in the domestic little love-in if you’d like. I’ll give you a floor of your own and everything.”

Clint is silent for a second, then says, “Thanks. For everything.”

“I’m allergic to thank-yous,” Stark tells him, then walks away. A second later, the elevator doors open, then close, and Annie and Clint are alone again.

Clint turns around to look at Annie, and she can see the bruises under his eyes. He looks awful. “I won’t be able to be here much, kiddo,” he says, “but you’re mine now, as much as you’re anybody’s, and I’m going to make sure you’re okay. Okay?”

Annie nods, and Clint pulls her into his arms, and she breathes.


	2. Baby Bird

Annie watches Tony Stark’s house fall into the ocean three days before Christmas during third period, while the kid next to her talks about how much he wants to fuck Pepper Potts. She’s tuning him out, mostly, because her attention is fixed on the footage of the Malibu mansion toppling into the ocean, Tony Stark with it.

He’s dead, she thinks, and she doesn’t know how to feel about it. He hasn’t been around much, not like Pepper—who she worships and adores, because Pepper Potts is possibly the most impressive human being Annie has ever had the honor of interacting with—but he did take her in when he didn’t have to, and he’s kind in his own way when she sees him. And if he’s dead, she doesn’t know where she’s going to end up.

She knows Tasha and Clint must have a plan, but both of them are on-mission somewhere out of the country, and she doesn’t have a safe way to contact them. So instead, she holds on to her composure for the rest of the school day, fingers curled around her sleeves.

As soon as she’s out of class, she pulls out her burner phone and dials a number she knows by heart. It rings twice then clicks to silence, into which she says, “Victor-Alpha-Seven, Codename Baby Bird.”

There’s a second, and then Laura says, “Hello, Baby Bird. What can I do for you?”

“If Stark is dead, I may need extraction. I don't know the protocols Hawkeye and Black Widow have in place, and both are currently radio silent.”

“Extraction protocols require confirmation of Stark’s death, a week of presumed death, an immediate threat, or confirmation by Potts of rescinded protection. Hold tight, Baby Bird, and I'll keep watch.”

Annie feels a little bit of the tension in her chest ease. There are protocols. She'll be okay. “Confirmed,” she says. “Thank you, Laura.”

“My pleasure,” Laura tells her, and then a man behind her says something, and everything fractures into pain and black.

\--

Annie wakes up tied to a chair, which is like every kidnapping cliché.

She has a dehydration headache and it feels like something small and furry died in her mouth, and from the splitting pain in the back of her head she’s pretty sure someone smashed her over the head with someone to knock her out.

It’s unfortunate for two reasons: head wound bleed a lot and she can feel a trickle of hot blood running down the back of her skull, and because the corresponding concussion is making it damn hard to think in any sort of straight line.

Not so hard that she can’t be mad at herself that she managed to be kidnapped by some idiot who clobbered her over the head. Dad and Clint and Tasha taught her better.

They also taught her how to get out of being tied up, which would be easier if she could get her brain together long enough to see straight.

The door banging open and rebounding against the wall with a clang of metal against concrete doesn’t help her headache in the least bit, and she squints at the light streaming in around the man striding into the room. The door closing behind him is a relief, even if the noise sends a shard of pain through her brain.

“Anastasia Park,” he says, looking at something in his hand. Her school ID, probably. “Who are you, then? SHIELD? Some sort of Stark Industries spy? Tony Stark’s lovechild?”

Annie laughs, which hurts. “Why does everyone think I’m Tony Stark’s lovechild?”

“You’ve been seen leaving Stark Tower every morning and returning there every afternoon.”

She starts gently twisting her wrists to see how the knots around them are tied. Worst case scenario, she’ll dislocate something to get out of them, but she’d really rather not do that. “I’m not Stark’s lovechild, or SHIELD. Look, whatever you took me for, you’re not going to get it. Stark’s dead, in case you haven’t heard, and nobody’s going to pay any ransom for me. Just let me go.”

The man just looks at her. “You think Pepper Potts wouldn’t pay to get back the last bit of flesh and blood that Tony Stark left behind?”

He turns and leaves, ignoring her when she shouts, “I’m not Tony Stark’s kid,” at his receding back.

Well, she thinks as the ropes bite into her wrist, that went well.

\--

The problem, she decides sometime later, with escape training is that she’s never done it with a concussion. She has all of these thoughts on how to get out, all of these ideas, but they’re elusive, slipping away from the corner of her brain every time she tries to pin one down. She _knows_ what to do, but she can’t get herself to think about it for long enough to actually do it.

She’s not totally sure what’s going to happen to her.

If the kidnapper’s smart, whoever the hell he is, he’ll kill her the second he realizes nobody will pay for her release. She’s seen his face.

Most people don’t like the idea of killing a kid or even a teenager, though, particularly a girl, and so she has that in her favor. He could be dumb enough to let her go. Watching Stark Tower indicates smart, not knowing the Stark policy on paying ransoms indicates significantly less so. Stark is notorious for breaking himself out of every kidnapping he’s ever experienced, usually with explosions involved. Stark does not pay ransoms.

And even if they did, Pepper is likely far too busy dealing with the absolute disaster of Stark’s death to realize that she’s gone, not until it’s too late.

If either Tasha or Clint were in the country, she would say that they would break her out without question, but neither of them are around, and even if they were, they wouldn’t have any way of knowing that she’s gone. She had a panic button, but it was tied to Dad, and so that’s not an option as a way to alert either of them.

Which leaves her breaking herself out. Which, again, would be easier if she could hold on to any useful thought for longer than a few seconds.

Her wrists are slippery with blood now, which despite the pain is to her advantage, because she’s pretty close to actually getting one of her hands free. And once she has one hand free, the rest shouldn’t be too bad. Though this position is putting a hell of a strain on her shoulders, an if she’s not fast and careful something probably going to give soon.

With her teeth jammed into her lip to keep from letting out a cry, she gives one last yank of her wrist, which slides, grinding, out of the rope. Her shoulder pops but doesn’t dislocate, and she bites down hard enough to draw blood.

Fuck, that hurts.

She twists around to wrestle her other hand free, then leans down to start undoing the ties around her ankles.

Which is when the world explodes.

Not really, but the sound of a grenade going off is leaves her ears ringing and sends so much pain through her head that she almost throws up, and she can’t do anything more than try to stay upright when the now-destroyed door falls in and two people storm the room.

Tasha reaches her first, cool hand touching her cheek. The touch is almost impersonal, except that it’s Tasha.

“Status, Baby Bird?”

Annie blinks at her, which seems to take slightly longer than a blink normally takes. “Concussion. Dehydration.” She swallows, her throat clicking. “Why are you here?”

Tasha crouches down to undo the ties around her ankles. “You know better than that,” she says chidingly in Russian. “We will always come for you, my bird.”

“You were on-mission.” She can’t think. Clint has an arrow nocked, bow drawn taut, pointed through the doorway. He hasn’t looked at her. “How—”

“Laura heard the attack and contacted us.” Tasha touches her face again, peering into her eyes. “Can you walk?”

“Probably.”

“You’ve got Baby Bird,” Tasha says, and Clint relaxes the tension on the string, slides the arrow back into his quiver, and attaches his bow to his quiver in one smooth move as Tasha rises to her feet and heads to the doorway. They change places, Clint heading over to her, and she ends up under his left shoulder with an arm as around his waist as she can manage with the quiver in the way.

He draws a gun, holding it low but ready with his right hand.

“Can I have one of those?” Annie asks.

“While you’re concussed?” Clint asks, and he sounds like it’s any other day, except for the thread of tension in the back of his voice. “Not on my life.”

They start moving, and the movement hurts Annie’s head so much that she has to close her eyes and trust Clint won’t walk her into anything so she doesn’t throw up.

She can feel fresh air like a tangible thing on her skin, and it’s the middle of the night, or close enough to it, and they’re fuck knows where, in some sort of industrial area. “New Jersey,” Clint says without her asking, or maybe she does ask and doesn’t realize it, and he’s opening the door to a car and helping her inside, and she leans her head back against the seat and just sits.

Clint’s arms reach around her to fasten her seatbelt, and then he touches her cheek and looks in her eyes and says, “Baby, I need you to stay awake for me until we can get you to a hospital.”

“I would have gotten out,” she tells him, because she feels like he should know she didn’t forget all the training him and Dad and Tasha gave her. “I had almost gotten out. I would have gotten out.”

He looks at her wrists, which are still bleeding a little, she thinks, then says, “I know, Baby Bird, but we need to get you to a hospital now, because you have a concussion.”

He closes the door and moves around to the front seat, and Tasha slips into the driver’s seat, and the car starts rumbling underneath her, and it makes her head hurt, more than it was already hurting, and she closes her eyes but Clint says, “Come on, baby, stay awake,” and so she opens her eyes again to show that she’s awake.

“Did I screw up your mission?” she asks, her head jolting as Tasha takes a hard turn. Clint is turned around in his seat to look at her, and Dad would tell him to put his seatbelt on properly, and she misses Dad, she misses him so much.

“We just accelerated the timeline,” Clint says, and after a second she realizes he’s answering the question she asked. “We will always come for you, Baby Bird, you know that, right? No matter what else is happening, no matter where we are, as soon as we can, we will come for you.” He smiles at her. “I know I’m not your Dad, but You’re the closest thing to my kid that I’ll ever have or want. Your Dad raised you right, raised you into a brilliant kid, and I know we’re not around much, but it’s an honor to look after you.”

Annie starts to shake her head, then realizes that’ll be a bad idea and stops. “’m not an honor. ‘m a teenager.”

Clint laughs. “You are.”

The car stops, and Clint and Tasha get out, Clint coming around to open her door. She scrabbles at her seatbelt, managing to get it off as Clint opens the door and helps her out. They’re in front of the ER entrance of a hospital, and Tasha has a gun out and Clint has his quiver and bow still on his back, and they’re going to freak out the hospital people, she thinks.

The automatic doors slide open, and there are a few random people in the waiting room, but Clint leads her up to the desk, saying, “Treat her. Now.”

The nurse gives him a wide-eyed look, made wider by Tasha flashing her SHIELD badge at her. It’s probably not what she should be doing, given that this isn’t a SHIELD thing, but Annie is leaning even more heavily on Clint, squinting because it’s too bright in here.

She’s pretty sure her head isn’t bleeding anymore, she thinks, and then she passes out.

\--

“—don’t know that Stark is dead.”

“Evidently it doesn’t matter, because his protection doesn’t seem to have done her a whit of good.”

Clint. That’s Clint, and the other voice was Tasha, and Annie can’t remember why they’re both here, but she hasn’t seen them together in a while, and she misses them, and even though it makes her head hurt she curls a little closer to Clint’s voice. His hand lands on her head, moving through her hair.

“And you think moving her out of the city for an indefinite length of time is the best solution? We cut her off from her options, that way, her opportunities.”

Clint makes an angry noise, though his hand is still gentle on her hair. “We can’t keep an eye on her here, not well enough. Without Stark’s guarantee—”

“If Stark is gone, I will ensure that Potts reaffirms that protection.” Another hand touches her hair. “I know you’re awake, моя Птичка.”

Annie hadn’t really been trying to hide it, but she opens her eyes anyway, squinting at the brightness of the light. “Sorry you had to come get me.”

Tasha puts a hand under Annie’s chin to tilt her head so that she’s forced to look her in the eye. “You are ours, моя Птичка. Do not forget it.””

“But you trained me—”

“Your training was not so that we would not come for you, but to try to keep you alive until we could do so.” She stands. “I will retrieve a doctor. One of us will be with you at all time until this issue with Stark has been resolved.”

Once she’s gone, Annie turns back to look at Clint, who’s surveying the room like he’s expecting an assassin to jump out of the shadows and attack her. She means to say something trivial, but what comes out is, “Would Dad be mad at me for being kidnapped?”

Clint looks over at her, looking startled, then goes determinedly back to looking around the room. She’s not sure where his quiver and bow are, but she’s sure they’re close. “Why would you think that?”

“People were following me and I didn’t notice, and I let myself be kidnapped, and you and Tasha had to leave your mission to get me back.” She presses her lips together, then blurts out, “And Dad was always mad at you when you got captured.”

“Your Dad…” Clint laughs, sounding a little sad. He always sounds a little sad when he talks about Dad, just like how the dark thing in her chest rears up again when she thinks about Dad. “Your Dad got mad at me when I got captured because it was my job to not get captured, and because getting captured meant I got injured. He got mad at me because I knew better, because I was trained better. You were trained, Annie, but not the way that we were. You were trained to keep you safe, not because it was your job. If Natasha and I have our way—if your Dad had his way—it will never be your job. So he wouldn’t be mad at you, because it’s not your job to keep yourself safe. Not at the end of the day. You do your part, you contribute, but Tasha and I, and your Dad before, we’re the ones whose job it is to make sure that at the end of the day, you go home.”

Annie closes her eyes. She doesn’t have a home anymore. Home was gone with Dad, with the attack on New York, with the rest of her life.

Clint’s hand settles in her hair again. “Your Dad would be proud of you. Your Dad was proud of you. He was so proud of you, so proud of what you did, how smart and good and brave you are. He loved you, kiddo.” Hot tears lock from her eyes, and she squeezes them shut tighter. “I love you. I know I’m not your Dad, I’ll never be your Dad, but I’d like to think I can be the next best thing.”

“Yeah.” The word hurts coming out, and she feels like it should feel like she’s betraying Dad, but it doesn’t, because it’s Clint, and he always loved Dad and her, and Dad loved him back. “Yeah.”

\--

Tony Stark comes back to life on Christmas Day, and Clint moves her from the safehouse they’ve been using—one of Tasha’s, so it’s not on SHIELD’s radar—back to Stark Tower the next day. Pepper had apparently been kidnapped as well, which makes Clint a bit more forgiving for her having not maintained their promise of protection.

Clint is quick to forgive, when he feels it’s fair. If he believes they were wronged, he will never forgive.

He has his own moral code, Dad said her when he first told her about Clint. Be loyal to him and he’ll be loyal to you. Be loyal to him, and he will give anything for you.

Right now, he doesn’t seem to want to let go of her, a hand around her shoulders as he leads her into the elevator. Her head still hurts, despite the ibuprofen she took earlier, but she’s steady now. The concussion wasn’t as bad as they had first thought, the dehydration and pain making everything worse.

“Agent Barton,” JARVIS says when the doors close and the elevator starts moving smoothly up. “Miss Park. I apologize for our lapse in security. The protocols that allowed you to be surveilled and then taken without our knowledge are in the process of being reviewed. All changes in Miss Park’s security will be run through Agent Barton and Agent Romanoff prior to implementation.”

“Thanks,” Annie says, and then the door opens to the penthouse, where Stark is pacing in front of Pepper, who is kind of glowing. Which is new.

Stark’s head snaps up when the exit the elevator, and he strides towards them. He looks tired and pale and stressed as fuck, like Annie but about a million times more. “I heard you joined the Kidnap Victims of the Month club,” he says, then immediately adds, “Fuck, I want a drink. You want a drink?”

“I’m on painkillers,” Annie tells him. “And also not old enough.”

“Like that ever stopped Tony,” Pepper says, but doesn’t come any closer. “Sorry if I seem like I’m avoiding you, but I have a somewhat unfortunate possibility of exploding. I truly am sorry for what happened to you, Annie.”

Annie shrugs. “’s okay. Are you okay?”

“Yes.” Pepper nods. She doesn’t look like she’s okay. “Yes, yes, I’m fine, thank you. A bit shaken up, but I’m…fine.” She glances at Clint, then back at Annie. “Did you manage to celebrate Christmas?”

“I don’t, um.” Annie swallows. Her throat hurts. “Dad and I, Dad was never home for Christmas, almost never home, so we didn’t celebrate Christmas, not really. We did New Years, most years. That was when he could get off, because fewer people tried to get off then, and so we did presents and watched the ball drop and—”

She stops. Presses her lips together. Tries not to start crying.

Dad is dead. They’re never going to do that again.

\--

Stark holds a party on New Year’s Eve, and Annie hides on her floor with Clint and Tasha and gives them each a present. To Tasha, she gives that fancy jam she likes to put in her tea but never buys for herself, and to Clint she gives some sheet music for two songs she wrote. He has a guitar, but he fiddles too. One is a solo piece that she’s been working on for a while, but the other is a twin fiddle piece that she wrote mostly when furious and hurting and wanting to have someone else with her.

It’s a Midwestern-style piece, what Clint knows, and she hopes—she hopes he gets it.

Clint takes the sheet music with gentle, trembling hands, flipping through the solo and then on to the duet. When he realizes what it is, he looks up at her with bright eyes. “Is this—”

Annie nods.

“Thank you.”

“If you want—” Annie swallows. “I know both parts. If you want.”

Clint looks down at the paper again, finger tracing across it. “It would be an honor.”

Annie grins. “I’m not an honor. I’m a teenager.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was going to be up earlier but I somewhat screwed up my computer (but I now have the temporary fix of an external keyboard, hooray).
> 
> Also, happy holidays, Merry Christmas, happy slightly belated solstice.


	3. Cupcake

Annie watches the fall of SHIELD from a safehouse in Yonkers.

Clint gets the text from Tasha while he and Annie are watching  _ Dog Cops _ on her floor of Stark Tower.  _ Fury Dead. SHIELD compromised. Go to ground. _

Clint jolts off the couch, going immediately to the bow propped in the corner of the room, saying, “Get your go-bag and anything else you’re going to need.”

Annie swallows, standing up and heading to her room. She’s stayed evacuation-ready since she moved in, because in the end of the day she’s never trusted that she was going to be able to stay. “Can I bring my laptop?”

Clint hesitates, hands still moving fluidly to get everything strapped on and in place, then says, “Make sure it’s off, battery out. Same with your phone. We’ll figure it out, but I want to get moving, now.”

“The Tower is safe,” JARVIS tells them as Annie grabs her go-bag and pulls her battery from her phone and laptop before stuffing the both inside.

“Thanks,” Clint says, and he almost sounds like he means it. “But I’m taking Annie somewhere SHIELD doesn’t know exists.”

\--

As soon as Clint clears and then locks up tight the safehouse in Yonkers, he pulls out a gun and presses it into Annie’s hands. She checks it automatically—full clip, one in the chamber—then looks up at him.

“SHIELD is compromised,” he tells her; one of the first things he’s said since they left the Tower. “Friendlies are Tasha, Stark, Potts, Banner if he shows up. Cap you shoot in the leg. Anyone else who comes in here without me or Natasha, you shoot to kill. You do not open the door. You do not put the battery back in your phone. Do you understand me?”

Annie nods. “Yes, sir.”

“Good.” He ruffles her hair. “I’m going to go stock up on supplies—we have the essentials, but I’m not sure how long we’re going to be here. Until I hear from Tasha again, unless there’s a threat to this location, this is where we’re going to stay. There’s $1000 in the safe under the loose floorboards near your bed. Get half of it when I leave, keep it on your person. If there’s an attack, leave, buy a burner and call my burner when it’s safe. Otherwise, stay inside and away from the windows.” He nods his head towards a half-filled bookshelf. “Read something. Keep yourself occupied, but stay alert.” He leans down and presses a kiss to her forehead. “I should be back within an hour.”

Once he’s gone, Annie does what he ordered, then takes a book from the shelf and curls up on the couch with it, though she doesn’t start reading it.

SHIELD is compromised.

She knows SHIELD has its issues, has always known it, grew up with stories of Fury’s ruthlessness, Maria Hill’s unwillingness to forgive, SHIELD screwing up and other people getting hurt. She saw that firsthand, saw Dad coming back with cuts and black eyes and—on one memorable occasion, whip scars he tried to hide from her. She saw the look on Clint’s eyes after missions so bad he came to their place instead of to the SHIELD dorm, hours after Dad got home, when he curled up on the couch and she curled up with him and he held her.

She knows SHIELD isn’t perfect, but it’s also what Clint and Tasha have, other than each other and her. It’s what her Dad loved, what he wanted to make better because he cared so deeply, believed so absolutely in his mission.

When she was little—five or so, a year after the evacuation and lose-the-tail games started—Dad sat her down and told her that he worked for an organization that did a lot of secret things, but it did them in secret because people would be scared if they knew about them, and if they were scared they might get hurt, or they might hurt other people. He said that she was a secret, too, because the organization wants to know everything, but once someone knows something they can’t unknow it, and one day it might be important that nobody know about her. And then he picked her up in his lap and held her and said that just because she was a secret it didn’t mean he didn’t love her, and that it meant that he actually loved her more.

She remembers asking him if there was anyone he would ever tell, other than Uncle Clint and Aunt Tasha, who he said were part of the secret organization but also family, and he smiled and told her that if they ever found Captain America he would tell him.

The thing is that her Dad was a normal parent, most of the time. They played the evacuation game and lose-the-tail and Clint taught her how to shoot a gun and throw a knife and Tasha taught her how to run and hide and never ever be found by anyone other than the three of them if she doesn’t want to be, but most of the time he was just…Dad, and they skated and he teased her about her violin squeaking when she screwed up her harmonic and she made fun of him for liking gas station donuts.

When he died, once she could think about it without curling up in a ball against the wall and pressing her lips together to keep the dark thing from crawling up her throat, she thought she should feel like SHIELD took her Dad from her, but she doesn’t, she never managed to, because he believed in SHIELD.

She’s glad her Dad isn’t around to see SHIELD fall.

\--

Annie levels her gun at the door when it unlocks, only lowering it when she sees for certain that the person standing in the doorway is Clint. He’s carrying a few plastic bags, which he sets on the kitchen table after locking the door behind him. She gets up off the couch and heads over to him, helping pull things out of the bags and put them away in the fridge.

While she’s doing that, he takes out and cuts open a plastic case holding a burner phone, which he hands to her. She pockets it next to the $500.

“Anything from Tasha?” she asks as she arranges the fridge so everything is in a logical place. 

“Nothing.”

When she closes the fridge door and turns to look at him, he’s staring at the table, looking unhappy. “She’ll get in touch.”

“I know.” Clint looks up at her. “I will keep you safe to the end of the world,” he says. “Whatever happens, I’m going to do whatever I can to make sure nothing happens to you.”

“I’m not scared for myself,” Annie tells him. She touches the phone in her pocket, thinks of Tasha’s number. She’s not going to contact her, can’t—it wouldn’t safe for any of them—but she wants to so badly she aches with it. “What happens if SHIELD falls? To Tasha, to you? What are you—what are you going to do?”

With me, she wants to ask. What are you going to do with me, if SHIELD is gone? Are you going to bring me to Laura and leave me there, are you going to become mercenaries again, are you going to go off and get yourself killed because you have nothing left to live for, because I’m not a good enough reason to stay alive?

Clint stares at her for a long time, and she wonders if he’s thinking the same things, but then he says, “Let’s play cards. We’re going to practice your card-counting skills.”

They do, and then they cook dinner, and both of them cook like they’ve been cooking on their own for years and learned out of necessity rather than for pleasure, nutrient-rich and more focused on utility than taste. Not that the food is bad, precisely, but it’s definitely more useful than good.

By the time they’re done cleaning up, it’s late enough that she should probably think about going to bed, if only to be well-rested to deal with whatever shit is coming the next day, but the thing is that she doesn’t—sleep, not really, not like she did when Dad was still alive, and she knows that she’s safe here, knows that being with Clint means that she’s safer than she could be otherwise, but the idea of huddling up alone in her bed and trying to not exist for a few hours while her entire world maybe falls apart around her scares the everloving shit out of her.

She’s pretty sure Clint can see that, because he says, “It’s okay if you need something to hold on to.”

They end up in the room he claimed, in a bed that isn’t really big enough for two adult-shaped people, but she presses herself tight against the wall and he lays down next to her so he’s facing the door and has a gun within arm’s reach without keeping it underneath the pillow, and she presses her forehead to his spine and closes her eyes and tries not to cry.

\--

By the end of the next day, Annie is ready to go insane. They still haven’t heard anything back from Tasha, but based on the 15 minutes she spent reading the news by accessing everything through the Tor Network over wifi they’re stealing from the coffeeshop nearby—possibly the worst way ever to access the internet, but a cautious Clint is a thing to behold—Captain America, a guy with metal wings, and a redheaded woman were seen being apprehended after a fight in DC with what was almost definitely a STRIKE team.

Which is bad.

They’re saying Captain America is a traitor, but he’s  _ Captain America _ , and he wouldn’t betray SHIELD, not like that.

Clint spends most of the day watching the door, still and hard and breathing like he’s readying himself to take a shot. He has a gun in his hand, his bow and quiver against the wall, and Annie would be scared if it wasn’t Clint.

More scared.

Because she doesn’t know Captain America, other than that awkward time in the kitchen with the eggs and her freaking the fuck out, but he’s  _ Captain America _ , and if Tasha is dead—

\--

That night she dreams of Dad.

They’re playing the lose-the-tail game, and she has her hood up and is glancing at shop windows like she wants to buy something, except she’s really checking to see if someone is behind her, and then she jogs up to a family, two parents and a kid between them holding their hands and swinging, and she keeps pace with them like she’s part of their family, the teenager exasperated with her family, and she knows Dad is behind her, she saw him in the reflection of the shop window, but when she turns like she’s going to say something to her fake-mom he’s not there, he’s gone, she’s lost him, she’s lost him, and her new family slips away from her as she slows, but Dad doesn’t reappear, there’s no one there—

“Shit.” Something pins her arms down, her legs, and she fights back, trying to break free, but they’re too strong, and there’s screaming, she’s screaming, Dad is gone, he’s gone, and Clint clamps a hand over her mouth, saying, “Shit, Annie, you need to calm down or someone’s going to come looking for us. Please, baby, it’s okay, shh, I need you to keep quiet.”

Annie’s muffled scream cuts off, and when Clint pulls his hand away she sucks in breath after breath. Her limbs stop fighting, the tension leaving them so quickly that they tremble against the bed. Clint moves so he’s not pinning her down, but he’s still hovering over her. In the dim light through the curtain, he looks washed out, greyscale.

“Want to tell me what that was about?” he asks finally, leaning back and then moving so he’s not on top of her. “Were you having nightmares like that at the Tower and the rooms are just soundproofed enough I never heard them?”

Annie shakes her head. The ceiling is gray and white above her, and she can just see Clint’s head out of the corner of her eye. “I have nightmares about Dad dying sometimes, the helicarrier falling out of the sky with him on it, but not—not in a while. This was—different.” She swallows. “Sorry.”

“We all have bad dreams, baby. Your Dad had them too, you know that.”

There had been a rule in her house, for when her Dad was home, that she couldn’t come into his room without making sure he was awake, because he could hurt her if she was next to him when he woke up. He gave Clint a green-purple bruise across his cheek, once, when they slept in the same bed.

She doesn’t think her Dad and Clint ever had sex, but she doesn’t really care, either. They loved each other, and that was all she ever cared about. When she was little, she used to think that they should get married and have sex, that that would produce another kid so she could have someone to be home with her when Dad couldn’t, but Dad had just smiled and explained the mechanics of sexual reproduction when she suggested that, and that had been the end of that.

With a sigh, Clint climbs off the bed. “I’m going to go check the doors and windows. Try to go back to sleep.”

That’s not going to happen and they both know it, but she nods anyway and waits until Clint is out of the room before jamming herself in the corner and shoving her head against her knees. The pressure helps a little, but the dark angry thing in her chest is growing again, twisting and writhing, and she wonders if this is how Dr. Banner feels right before the Hulk comes out.

She hears when Clint comes back into the room, but she doesn’t bother to react until he sits down next to her, leaning his shoulder against hers. “If I never have to hear you scream like that,” he says into the quiet, “it will be too soon.”

Annie presses her lips together. “Sorry.”

He sits next to her, and breathes, and her shoulder grows warm from his body heat even as cold seeps into her other side through the wall. Finally, he says, “If SHIELD falls—if SHIELD is compromised—I’m going to stay. In Stark Tower, if it’s safe for you. Somewhere else, if it’s not. SHIELD is my job, but you—you’re my kid.”

Annie starts to cry, tears leaking out from underneath her closed eyelids. “Dad always left,” she whispers. "Dad loved me, but he always left."

That feels traitorous to say, almost, because her Dad was the best father she could have had, her Dad was awesome, and she loves her Dad more than anything. But he always left, and one day he never came back.

“If your Dad hadn’t had SHIELD, he wouldn’t have left you. He would have stayed there with you, he would have come home every night to you. He wouldn’t have left you if he didn’t have to.”

“I know.”

“He didn’t want to leave you,” Clint says, and he sounds urgent now, like he needs her to believe it.

And she does. But it hurts anyway.

\--

SHIELD falls on a Sunday, three helicarriers falling out of the sky over DC as decades of SHIELD secrets are released to the web, and Annie sits in front of her computer and watches BBC and thinks, thank God Dad isn’t around to see what the world has become.

Thinks, if Dad was around, this would never have happened.

Clint is back sitting in front of the door, apparently ignoring the British newscaster’s commentary on DC and the fact that someone thought they saw Captain America fall from a helicarrier—if Captain America is alive, Tasha might be, Tasha might be alive, but she can’t think about that, they can’t think about that, not until they knew, because hope is a traitorous thing and tastes like acid against her tongue—as he smooths a thumb over his gun.

He has $500 and a burner phone with one number programmed into it in his pocket. She has $500 and the phone with that number in her pocket. If it comes to it, she will evacuate, contact Laura and get herself to the Farmhouse, and wait there until they get further instructions or she turns eighteen in three months.

Laura is someone Clint met during his mercenary days, running with a kid, trained but hampered by the fact that she had a baby with her. Clint helped her set up the Farmhouse, where she could stop running and raise a kid, and in exchange she helped raise other kids, ones who couldn’t enter the system for whatever reason.

There are two kids there right now, Annie thinks. Laura’s biological kid is off in college—University of Michigan—and Annie only met him once, years ago when Dad brought her to meet Laura. He’s nice, from what Annie remembers.

Annie hears Clint’s phone vibrate from across the room, and she forces herself to stay still, stay where she is, fingers curled into fists that she presses against her thighs. It should be Tasha—Tasha’s the only person who should know how to contact them—but there’s no guarantee that JARVIS or Stark haven’t figured out how to get in touch, or it could be—

She breathes.

“SHIELD has fallen,” Clint says, getting to his feet. “Natasha’s alive.”

“Слава богу,” Annie breathes, shoving her fists into her legs in the hopes that the pressure will keep her from crying. Tasha’s alive. Tasha’s alive. “Where are we going, then? Are we meeting up with her?”

“She said to hold in position until—”

There’s a rattling at the door, and Clint levels his gun at it, moving between Annie and the door. She wants to move so she has a clear line of fire, but it’s more important not to distract Clint than anything else, so she stays where she is.

After a second, the door opens, whoever’s on the other side letting out a soft, “Ha.” And then the door swings open entirely, and Annie has just enough of a view around Clint to see Tony Stark standing outside of the apartment, lockpicks in one hand. He’s in a hoodie and jeans, which she thinks should feel incongruous but yet doesn’t.

After a tense second, Clint lowers the gun, saying, “Get in here and close the door. What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I promised to protect the kid,” Stark says, pocketing the lockpicks. He steps into the apartment, closing the door behind him. “I would have come earlier, but I’ve been a bit busy trying to get as much Stark tech off SHIELD servers as I can before the leak.”

Clint frowns at him. “You knew the information was going to be released?”

“Did I know someone was going to go in and intentionally release terabytes of data to a public that shouldn’t have access to it? No. But I knew that the second there was a hint of instability, every country and mildly ambitious hacker in the world was going to try to get in and get whatever they could before it either locked itself back up tight or came crumbling down.” He shrugs. “It’s what I would have done if I hadn’t already been inside their system. Anyway.” He dismisses that with the wave of a hand. “SHIELD, HYDRA, nobody is going to touch her, but I can’t keep her safe if I don’t know where she is.”

Clint hesitates, then asks, “How do I know I can trust you?”

“If you didn’t trust me, you wouldn’t have let me through that door. Given the current state of things, right now is the safest time for you to move, because nobody will be watching. But that means we need to move.” He looks around Clint at Annie. “Hey, cupcake. How’s it going?”

Annie rolls her eyes. “Don’t call me cupcake.”

“Munchkin? Stasya? Little assassin?”

“She’s not an assassin,” Clint snaps.

Annie rolls her eyes. “He’s just trying to rile you up.”

“Little assassin it is, then.”

“When he’s not trying to piss me off, he usually calls me Anastasia or, at worst, kid.” She climbs off the couch, pressing her gun into Clint’s hand. “I’ll go get both of our grab bags.”

“Put the $500 back in the safe, make sure you lock it up afterwards.”

Annie goes, and when she gets back from grabbing her bag and then Clint’s, Clint and Stark are staring at each other. Clint’s put one gun away but not the other, and Stark is fiddling with his phone without bothering to look at it. Both of them look over at her when she walks in. 

“Ready to go?” Stark asks. “This should only take about half an hour, but I don’t want to be out any longer than necessary.” They both nod. “Also, cupcake, you know how to drive, in case things go to shit?”

Annie nods. “Yeah, I can drive.”

“Great.” He claps his hands. “Back to civilization we go.”

“This is Yonkers, not Siberia.”

Stark gives an exaggerated shudder, then pockets his phone. “Well, kiddies, sunlight’s burning.”

Stark’s car is the least ostentatious one he owns, a blue BMW with regular plates, and he keeps his hood up the whole time they’re outside, sunglasses jammed on his face even though it’s nearly dusk. Annie takes both of the bags in the back with her, while Clint holds his bow and quiver between his legs.

Once the doors are closed and locked, JARVIS’s gentle voice says, “Hello, Agent Barton, Miss Park.”

“Hi, JARVIS.” Annie lets out a breath. “How are things going?”

“The Tower is secure,” JARVIS tells her, as Stark starts the car and pulls away from the curb. “We are currently tracking HYDRA movements across the country so that we can decide the best way of responding.”

“HYDRA?” Stark had mentioned HYDRA earlier, but Annie hadn’t really registered it. “What does HYDRA have to do with this?”

Stark makes a weird noise in his throat. “Apparently dear old dad—my father, not yours—didn’t manage to defeat HYDRA quite as well as he thought he did, and instead they hired a mess of HYDRA scientists who have been poisoning it from the inside out.” He lets out a slow breath. “The helicarriers—using my fucking repulsor technology—were part of some plan to kill everyone who could be a threat to HYDRA. JARVIS is sorting through the details, so I’ll know more in a few hours, but—they’d have hit you, cupcake, along with the rest of us. I don’t know where they got your name, but if it’s online, I’ll make sure it’s gone by tomorrow.” His fingers drum on the wheel. “The sons of bitches would have hit you, Pepper,  _ Harley _ —”

“Sir,” JARVIS interrupts. “There are reports that Steve Rogers has been brought to Sibley Memorial Hospital and is currently undergoing surgery.”

Annie swallows a noise before it can escape her throat. Stark’s hand just tightens on the steering wheel. “Secure the OR, coordinate to prepare him to be moved to a room I control as soon as he’s stable. Get Pepper on it if you need to.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And get me his medical records as soon as you can. I want to know everything.”

“Yes, sir.” 


	4. Annie

“I need a list of everyone being held in the Fridge. All of them. Now.”

Phil waits only until he sees Skye get to work on her laptop before pacing away, barely resisting the urge to shove his hand through his hair. SHIELD, gone. Garrett, a traitor. Melinda—he doesn’t know what Melinda is, but he knows he can’t trust her, not anymore. He doesn’t know who he can trust, beyond his team, a team that keeps getting smaller.

Everything was easier, before Manhattan. Before a god killed him and he lost Romanoff and Barton. They’re not HYDRA, he knows that. They just also think he’s dead.

“I have a list,” Skye says. “This is—a lot of people, actually. How many prisoners did we have stuffed in there, anyway?”

“A lot.” Phil walks over to her, looking at the list on the computer over her shoulder. It’s worryingly long, filled with names he had hoped to never see again. “Anything stand out?”

“Uh.” She scrolls through the list. “A few really bad people, a ton of people I’ve never heard of. Mostly men, a few women. Raina. Someone named Felicity Park—”

She keeps listing names, but Phil misses it over the rushing in his ears. He—hadn’t forgotten about Felicity, precisely, but he hadn’t thought about her in—

“Sir?”

Phil makes himself swallow, slow his breathing. “Figure out where Park is headed. As soon as you have an idea, let me know.”

Skye turns to look at him. “Is she really that important? Of all the people on here—”

“Do it.”

\--

Felicity is headed to New York City, apparently, and so so is Phil, and he finds himself tracking Felicity up to the thirty-second floor of Stark Tower, and he doesn’t know why she’s there but feels like he should, feels like his knowledge of Felicity is tangled up in a knot in his head, the woman he loved tied up with the accident, a rush of memories.

She’s not the first person he put in the Fridge, nor the last, but she was the hardest, her hands around her daughter’s throat, cradled up against her body, ashy white and so, so still.

FitzSimmons come up with him, Fitz’s hands still fiddling with the device as they move, and Triplett stays with the jet for a quick exfil if necessary.

“Based on the information from the files,” Simmons says as Fitz works, “she can pull a person’s body heat out with skin-to-skin contact. What we’re going to need to do is overload her, force so much heat from her body that she can’t take it.”

Phil hesitates, then forces himself to ask, “Will it kill her?”

“Sorry, sir,” Simmons says, “but we don’t know. There’s not enough time, not enough data. It’s the best we can come up with that’s safe for us to use, at least on such short notice.”

That’s not the answer Phil wanted, but he’s not sure what answer he  _ did _ want. By all rights, he shouldn’t be here, he’s too compromised, but there’s nobody else, and he has to--

He doesn’t know what Felicity’s doing here of all places, but he has to stop her, and he has to do it before she can hurt someone.

“Unfortunately,” Simmons says, “you’re going to need to get this on to her skin, which means you’re going to need to get close enough to touch.” She gestures towards a flat, textured side of the device. “Put that part on her skin, and it’ll activate.”

Phil nods. “When I confront her, stay out of the way. She’s dangerous.”

Simmons hesitates, but FItz grabs her arm and after a second she says, “Yes, sir.”

“Good.”

Phil steps out onto the thirty-second floor from the stairwell, device held firmly in one hand, to see Felicity already there, trying to fight through Barton to get to a girl pressed against a far wall. Felicity is between the girl and the door, which is probably the only reason Barton hasn’t gotten her to safety, and while Barton is clearly the superior fighter, every point of contact between him and Felicity does greater injury to him than to Felicity.

Felicity looks older, Phil thinks in the compartmentalized part of his brain, the part forcibly separated from the analytical part he needs to function as an agent. Older and thinner, her softness slimmed down to muscle and sharp lines. Her hair is chopped short too, ragged in a way that suggests she took scissors to it herself.

Barton’s eyes land on Phil, and Phil sees the second he registers who Phil is, and this is not how Phil wanted him to find out, truly, but it’s too late for that now, and he’s not going to let that mess distract either of them from what needs to be done.

Phil can tell the moment when Felicity catches sight of him, the falter in her step, and takes advantage of that to order, “Get to the girl, I have her.”

Barton barely hesitates before breaking off towards the girl, and Phil lunges forward to jam the device against the exposed skin of Felicity’s sternum.

For a breathless second he thinks nothing is happening, and then Felicity starts screaming, clawing at the device with one hand while the other grasps at Phil’s neck. He has to stay close to keep her from pulling the device away, and every touch from her hand is like a point of dry ice, burning with how cold it is. He twists away, but the movement nearly dislodges the device, and he can’t let that happen, so he stops fighting, lets her hand settle around his throat as she screams and screams and screams.

Her touch is excruciating, distinct points of agony with ice spreading around each, but after too many too-fast heartbeats he feels the ice receding, the pain fading.

When she falls, he lets the device fall with her, and all he can see is Felicity’s body, limp and splayed like a broken doll on the floor. Liver temperature will be wrong, he thinks distantly, and it’s a good thing they won’t be relying on rigor mortis to determine time of death.

There is a wordless scream, and he jerks his head up to see the girl being restrained by Barton, eyes glittering like she’s restraining tears.

The girl is staring at Phil, half-limp in Barton’s arms, and Phil thinks, shit, I just killed her mother in front of her. He doesn’t know how he knows she’s Felicity’s daughter, exactly, mostly because he doesn’t actually remember Felicity having a daughter, but he—

He knows.

Which is kind of shit, because now he feels kind of bad for having killed Felicity here and now, despite the fact that she was trying to break into Stark Tower and do—something.

“Barton,” he says instead of acknowledging the fucking disaster that is what just happened with Felicity.

Barton flinches, physically recoiling back from Phil even though there’s probably fifteen feet between them already. His expression hardens then, his grip on the girl shifting from restraint to something else. “You’re a fucking son of a bitch,” he snarls which, yeah, Phil can’t really blame him for. But then Barton continues, “Even if you were following orders, even if you were—whatever fucking reason you had to keep your apparent fucking resurrection from me, from Natasha—you are the worst fucking human being for doing this.”

Phil resists the urge to rub at his chest, which aches at the words. He’s always known that Barton would be angry, if he found out, but to hear him say that—“After this long, Barton, what would telling you have done? SHIELD is gone, you’ve moved on—”

“Fuck you, sir.” Barton tips his head down to the girl’s ear, whispering something to her, and Phil has the somewhat startling revelation that Barton knows the girl. He’s not sure why, not sure how Barton would know Felicity’s daughter—Felicity’s daughter who Phil shouldn’t recognize as Felicity’s daughter, and this is a hole in his memory that shouldn’t be there, because this isn’t part of Tahiti, and he doesn’t understand what’s going on.

The girl turns back and says something to Barton, and Barton stiffens, eyes focusing back on Phil. He fights the urge to squirm, because Barton isn’t known as Hawkeye for nothing. He doesn’t know what Barton is looking for.

“He could be a LMD,” Barton says, and then Romanoff and Stark appear out of a side door, and FitzSimmons pop out at the noise, and this is going to devolve into a shooting gallery if Phil doesn’t stop this disaster in its tracks.

So he snaps, “Stand down, agent,” in his handler voice, and Barton and Romanoff react instinctively, coming to attention. To his surprise, Felicity’s daughter does to, going still and ready and waiting in Barton’s arms. Or arm now, given that he only has one around her now, wrapped around her waist and tucking her in close.

He hopes they’re not fucking, not least of which because she looks barely eighteen, if that. The fact that Phil has been moderately in love with Barton for the better part of a decade has almost nothing to do with it.

The way that Barton’s holding her doesn’t look sexual, though. It almost looks parental, and he wonders if she’s one of Laura’s kids, because Laura takes in—

Baby bird.

Phil shakes his head, trying to shove that out. He has things in his head sometimes, and he has to get better at shoving them out.

“Why don’t you get Felicity’s daughter out of here,” he says, because if this is going to turn into a mess he doesn’t want the kid in the middle of it, “and then we can talk about this.”

“Felicity’s daughter?” The girl lets out a choked laugh, yanking away from Barton. He doesn’t stop her, even though he could. “Is this really—is this really what we’re going to go with, now? Is this—this isn’t him, Clint. Whoever the fuck this is, he’s not—” Her voice cuts off into a sob, and she turns to bury her face in Barton’s chest, arms wrapping around him. He wraps his arm around her again, pressing her up against him, eyes never leaving Phil.

Now Phil is really confused. “Is she not Felicity’s daughter?”

The girl pulls away again, stalking towards him, and he sees the glint of a knife in her hand just before she presses it up against his throat. FitzSimmons squeak.

Nobody moves.

There’s something familiar in her face, this close, something around the mouth and the lines of her cheekbones, and his heart clenches again. Something is wrong, beyond the fact that this girl has a knife to his throat. “I am Felicity’s daughter,” she says, voice low. “But that’s not all I am. I’m also yours. Or at least I’m Phil Coulson’s daughter, so whoever the fuck you are, get rid of my dad’s face before I peel it off you.”

“Baby,” Clint says  _ come on baby bird _ , “if you hurt him you’ll regret it.”

“The fucker is wearing Dad’s face.”

“And if you see him hurt, you’ll regret it.” Clint’s voice is calm, talk-down-the-the-agent-who’s-snapped calm, and the girl’s shoulders settle a little even if the knife doesn’t move from her throat. Phil doesn’t relax, though, mostly because he’s seen upset people do crazy things. “Come with me, and Stark will take him somewhere secure until we can figure out what the fuck is going on.”

The girl doesn’t move for a long minute, knife still steady at Phil’s throat, and then she pulls it away, backing away from Phil. She looks hard, not in the way that abused children do but in the way agents do, as though it’s through training rather than neglect, and he doesn’t know what’s going on but he doesn’t like the thought that he has something to do with that look in her eyes.

“I’m—” he starts to say, and then his brain flinches.  _ I’m not your father _ , he wants to say, but he—that’s not—

Stark clunks over to him in his suit, gauntlets closing around Phil’s wrists, and yanking them behind Phil’s back. He lets it happen, just like he let the girl put the knife to his throat, because he—

He wants to know what’s going on, and if anyone can figure it out, it’s Stark. As much as he never wants to admit that aloud to Stark.

Simmons makes a worried noise, hurrying over towards them to say, “Sir, we—you’re Iron Man, that’s so cool—but sir, are you okay? Are you—what should we do?”

“You’re going to another holding room,” Stark says, starting to manhandle Phil towards one of the elevators, “until I figure out what the deal is with Zombie-Agent. And Birdbrain.” He turns towards Barton, who’s hovering near the girl. “Keep the kid away.”

“I’m not a kid,” the girl snaps, at the same time Barton says, “I know.”

“Good.” Stark looks back at Phil. “Come on. JARVIS, keep Pepper away for the time being. I don’t care what excuse you use, but I don’t want her in the tower until we know what’s going on.” They reach the elevator, which opens for them and then starts moving as soon as they’ve both stepped into it. Once it’s in motion, Stark says, “I hope you’re not the real Agent, for the kid’s sake. Because if you are, you might actually take the shittiest dad award from Howard, and that’s saying something.”

“The girl’s not—”

“I like exactly two children,” Stark says, pushing Phil out into the hallway as the elevator door opens, “and she is one of them. So understand that there are a very limited number of situations that don’t end with me giving you to Romanoff and Barton to deal with you like they want to. Because, hey, you’re dead, so it’s not like the government’s going to come looking for you if someone reports you missing.”

“I really am Phil Coulson,” Phil says as they enter who looks like an interrogation room. “You can run my biometrics, whatever else you need to, but I am Phil Coulson.”

“There are ways to trick biometrics, and if I know them, you do too.” Stark shoves Phil down into a chair, moving his hands to the table, and cuffs grow out of the table to circle his wrists. There’s a chance that Phil could get out of them, but he’s honestly not sure at the moment, and for the first time he feels a frisson of fear. He’s been pretty sure Stark wouldn’t kill him, but he’s now not too keen on being trapped in this room, no matter how much he wants to know what’s going on.

Maybe more importantly, and this is how he knows his brain is fucked, he should never have allowed FitzSimmons be taken in. 

“I want a full medical workup,” Stark says, presumably to JARVIS. “I want to know who he is, what he is, and why he’s wearing Agent’s face.”

“I am Phil Coulson.”

“ _ Now _ ,” Stark says, louder, then stomps out of the room.

As soon as the door closes, there is a pinch at his wrist, like a needling sliding in and then out, and he grimaces. He’s not sure what Stark will find in his blood, which is the thing he should be having an issue with, but also that  _ hurts _ , and he hasn’t slept in god knows how long, and everything feels bright and sharp and edged with knives.

This whole thing is such a clusterfuck, and the only real reassurance he has that Stark won’t turn him over to Talbot or worse is his knowledge of how much Stark hates the US military. If anyone’s going to be disappearing Phil, it’ll be Stark, and he’ll do it honestly.

Time stretches out in front of Phil, sitting in that room, and he wants to knuckle away exhaustion and grit and the image of that girl he almost knows. Because there’s something there, something beyond how she looks like Felicity, and maybe he just has that feeling because of her resemblance to Felicity, but there’s something—

She’s not his daughter. She can’t be. He doesn’t have a daughter, would remember having one. He would have to remember it. 

And besides, nobody ever asking him about her. Fury or Hill, none of them asked him about his daughter, and he’s been friends with Fury since his Ranger days and he’s pretty damn sure Fury would ask about his fucking  _ daughter _ —

_ Once somebody knows something they can’t unknow it. _

Phil’s breath shudders out of his lungs tasting like panic, and he swallows to keep from doing something stupid. He doesn’t know her. She’s not his daughter. She can’t be.

He would know if she was.

Stark comes back in about half an hour later, by Phil’s estimate, dressed this time in a suit rather than the Iron Man armor; with both hands shoved in his pockets, the outlines of wristbands that almost certainly connect to the armor are barely visible.

Stark stares at him for a moment, then takes a seat across from Phil. He doesn't look happy. "See, the thing is," he says finally, "you have the same DNA as Agent. Looks are easy to fake. DNA is not. Not impossible, but difficult. That means that chances are, you are who you say you are. The question is how. Fury is a lying asshole is the obvious choice, but given how deep JARVIS is in SHIELD and that there's nothing in the released documents, I still should have seen something. So then we need to ask, was it HYDRA that brought you back, and if so, why shouldn't I kill you right now?”

He falls silent, and Phil realizes belatedly that Stark wants him to answer. "I'm not HYDRA," he offers, "though you have no reason to believe me when I say that. I did die, on the Helicarrier, and I don't have all of the details on how I was brought back back."

"Let's say I believe you. That means you’re the person who abandoned his own daughter on, what, Fury's orders? I can't claim to have known you all that well, before your Jesus impersonation, but I have to say you didn't seem like the kind of person to do that. How do you explain that part?"

"I can't," Phil says, frustrated.

“Try harder.”

There are a million things Phil says, but what comes out is, “Is she really my daughter?”

Stark’s eyes narrow. “You’re not doing much of a job convincing me not to disappear you into the nearest convenient hole.”

“I—” Phil wants to rub his eyes, can’t. “I am Phil Coulson. You can ask Maria Hill, if you know where she is, or if you’re still in contact with Thor one of his compatriots, Lady Sif, has seen me since my—” He chokes on the word resurrection, can’t force it out of his mouth. He used to be much better at this sort of thing still is, but this is all fucked up. “Is she my daughter?”

He needs to know that, if nothing else.

But Stark just says, “JARVIS, get me Maria Hill from whatever training seminar she’s in. I don’t care what she’s doing, I want her now.” And then he stalks back out of the room, leaving Phil alone again.

It’s only a few minutes before the door opens again, and Phil isn’t sure who he’s expecting--Stark and Maria, Barton, Romanoff, a janitor--but it’s not the girl, Felicity’s daughter, skirting carefully into the room and closing the door behind her. She glares at the security camera before looking at him.

“So.” The girl stares accusingly at him. “You're my dad.”

“Apparently.”

“And you don't remember me.”

“No.”

The girl's expression twists, pulling tight and then flattening the way he knows his does when he's in crisis mode. “Do you remember Clint? Tasha?”

Barton and Romanoff, she must mean. Phil nods. “Yes.”

“So it's just me you've erased. I'd ask if it was just your way if protecting who you love, but you remember them.” Her eyes close briefly, like she's steeling herself, and then she opens then and says, “Okay. Okay.”

She turns and walks out if the room, the door swinging shut behind her. Just before it's closed, he hears a sound like the shattering of glass, shards of it clattering against Stark's hallway floor. And then the door closes and all sound cuts off.

It's barely two minutes before the door opens again, and Phil looks up from his hands, expecting to see the girl standing there again. Instead it's Stark, Maria Hill a step behind him. 

She gives him a wry smile. “Hello, Phil.”

“So this is him,” Stark says briskly. “Good. Now maybe you can explain why the hell he doesn't remember his own kid, before I throw you to the US government and let you hang.”

Maria gives him a startled look. “His kid? Phil doesn't have any kids.”

“Three people and some pretty extensive DNA testing say you're wrong, so try again.” Stark drums impatient fingers against the table. “Soon, please, so I know what I can tell a teenager who just put her hand through a plate glass wall about why her dad doesn't know who she is.”

“You never told me you had a kid,” Maria says, and she looks nearly as shaken as Phil has ever seen her. Something resolves in her eyes, settling there, and she says, “The way we brought you back, there were…holes. Things that didn't piece back together right the first time. Fury and I patched those holes, but if there was something missing that we didn't know about, we wouldn't have--we could only fix what we know was broken.”

“So I'll just never remember anything about my child?”

Maria gives him a helpless, apologetic look, lips pressed tight, and he can't help but hate her a little bit, in that moment, because he had a child he will never remember, a child he has lost without ever knowing her, and now he'll have to mourn that with everything else, with SHIELD.

“Not necessarily.”

Phil looks, startled, at Stark; he has a cheeky grin on his face, the kind of look he gets when he knows something nobody else does. 

Phil doesn't have the patience for that kind of smug shit right now. “What are you talking about?”

“In my employ--or, well, under contract, but six of one--is Helen Cho, who took this”--he taps his chest, where the arc reactor sits--”out. If there's something to fix--which, given that you repaired some of it before, seems likely--she and her people can fix it.” He claps his hands. “There, problem solved. Aren't things so much easier when you come to me instead of building helicarriers with my tech and Nazi programs and hoping they don't try to commit genocide?”

“Stark--”

“I have to see a teenager about a hand,” Stark says. “JARVIS, you know what to do.”

Maria lets out an audible, shaky breath. “I’m sorry, Phil. I didn’t know.”

Maybe there’s a reason for that, Phil thinks, and doesn’t say anything.

\--

Things move quickly after that, not that they’ve been particularly slow so far, and within a couple hours he finds himself in a hospital gown in the most high-tech infirmary he’s ever been in, a woman who had introduced herself as Helen Cho reading over notes on a tablet next to his bedside.

“Do you understand what we’re going to do?” she asks, looking up from the screen she’s tapping on.

Phil sighs. “Understand might be an overstatement. I don’t think I have the technical expertise to understand what you’re going to do.”

She smiles. “Fair enough. But I need to know that you understand enough to consent.”

“You’re going to be doing brain surgery to patch the holes in my memory. I’m fine with that.”

“Not brain surgery, precisely, but that’s close enough.” She looks over her shoulder. “I think there’s someone here to see you.”

Phil sits up to see the girl--his daughter, she’s his daughter, he’s forgotten he has a daughter--standing in the doorway, clutching on to the doorframe. She straightens when she sees him looking, tucking a bandaged hand behind her back.

“I’m not going to--”

“I’ll give you a few minutes,” Dr. Cho says, “while I finalize things with JARVIS.” She heads out of the room, putting a hand on the girl’s shoulder as she passes.

The girl waits until Dr. Cho is gone before heading in to the room, one hand still held awkwardly behind her back. It must be the hand she put through the plate glass window. Phil gestures her closer, feeling vulnerable and uncomfortable in his hospital gown in front of this girl who knows him even though he doesn’t know her.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt anything,” she says. “I don’t want to delay the surgery.”

“Not a surgery, or so I’ve been told.” The girl retreats a little, and Phil hurries to add, “You’re not delaying anything.” He feels so tongue-tied here, caught between wanting to treat her as any other civilian and the knowledge that she’s family. The only family he has left.

The girl nods, looking down at her hands. Then she looks back up, eyes focusing on his neck. “‘m sorry,” she mumbles. “For the knife.””

“Oh. Thanks. I’m sorry for not remembering.”

She shakes her head, looking suddenly angry. “Don’t apologize for that. What SHIELD did--I’d burn SHIELD to the fucking ground for what they did, if they weren’t already a smoldering pile of rubble.”

Phil barely restrains his flinch at that. It’s too soon, too tender a wound. “You know about SHIELD, then.”

“I live with Clint and Tony Stark, what did you think?” She shakes her head. “I’m going to go now. I just wanted to...I don’t know, say goodbye or something. In case you die, I’ll have seen you not chained to a table.” She shakes her head again, turning away. “Probably a stupid idea. You don’t even know me.”

On instinct, watching her walk away, Phil says, “Baby Bird.”

His daughter’s shoulders tighten, and she stops where she is. After a second, she says. “Don’t call me that, not until you remember why.” And then she walks out of the room.

\--

Phil wakes to a low-grade headache and the sound of breathing beside him. He's somewhere pleasantly cool, a warm blanket pulled up to his chest.

"Before you ever met Clint," Phil says without opening his eyes, and the breathing next to him hitches, "you were so infatuated with the idea of him that you tried for months to get me to get you archery lessons, so I started calling you baby bird."

Annie sniffles. "You remember."

Phil opens his eyes and looks at her, his daughter, the most important person in his life. She looks thinner than he remembers, older, and he hates himself for leaving her alone and Fury for forcing him to. Then he spots her hand, wrapped in gauze, and anger rises up for another reason. "You put your hand through plate glass, Annie, really? What the hell?"

"You didn't remember me," she snaps, eyes bright. "You were sitting there in one of your suits, talking to me like I was one of your random civilians."

He reaches out and takes her injured hand, cradling it in his own. He wants to check the injury for himself, like he would for Barton or Romanoff, but he knows better than to undo a doctor's work. "So you hurt yourself?"

Annie grimaces. "I was mad." She closes her eyes, some of the anger easing to sorrow. "I'm sorry you had to kill mom."

"I'm sorry you had to see it." Annie shrugs, ducking her head so he can't see her face, but he knows her and he knows that trick, so he presses two fingers under get chin, tipping it up to force her to look at him. "I would have spared you that, if I'd known."

And that's another reason to hate that he didn't remember, that his daughter had to watch him kill her mother.

But Annie shakes her head. "I'm not--that's not it. It's not you. It's that my mom--Felicity tried to hurt me. I don't--" She bolts up, pulling away from him, and he sits up, not entirely sure what just happened. "I'm going to go get Clint and Tasha, and fair warning, one or both of them might punch you in the face."

That, Phil probably deserves.

But neither of them get a chance to punch Phil, because they come back with a woman Phil recognizes as Dr. Helen Cho. She checks the half-dozen machines beside his bed while Barton and Romanoff stare stonily at him, then asks, "How are you feeling?"

"Remarkably well, considering I just went through brain surgery."

"Not brain  _ surgery _ , per say. But that's good. Any pain?"

"I have a slight headache. A one, maybe a two."

"That's to be expected at this time, though I can give you some ibuprofen if you'd like. And now for the real question--do you remember everything?"

Phil shrugs. "I thought I remembered everything before, but I remember... more." Teaching Annie how to skate, the sound of her violin, her asking if he and Barton will give her a little brother or sister....

"That's good." Dr. Cho steps back from the bed. "I'll leave you alone, but only if you promise no violence."

Romanoff turns a practiced smile on her. "Of course."

The smile doesn't seem to do much; Dr. Cho just gives her a skeptical look when she says, "Okay."

As soon as the door is shut behind her, Barton demands, "Why?" He looks like he did when Phil allowed him to be restrained in medical because he kept fighting, angry and betrayed.

“Why what?”

Barton lunges towards him, and Romanoff wraps an arm around his abdomen, holding him where he is. She says something in his ear, fast and Russian and too low for Coulson to follow, and Barton stops struggling, though his shoulders stay high and tight. “Why did you stay away? Why didn’t you tell us you were alive? Even if you didn’t remember Annie, did you really think we wouldn’t care that you were still alive?”

“I did die,” Phil says, which is apparently not the right answer, at least judging by the look on Barton’s face. Romanoff’s expression is totally flat, which is also not a great sign. “I just--I’m starting to think none of my decisions since my...recovery have been great. Not that that’s an excuse, but I truly--I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Really,” Romanoff drawls sharply, and Phil feels his cheeks heat. He’s off balance here, in a hospital gown without the armor of his suit and tie or his authority or SHIELD, talking to two people he never expected to have to explain himself to again.

“Fuck this,” Barton snaps before Phil can think of something else to say. “Fuck this, and fuck you. I’m not going to tell Annie whether or not to talk to you again, that’s her decision, but right now, for myself, I’m thinking not.”

Back rigid, he turns and stalks out of the room, shutting the door behind him, and before Phil can even get out of bed Romanoff is leaning over him, pressing him back down with a hand on his shoulder.

“I need to--”

“You need to leave him alone, unless you have some way to make this better.” She sits on the edge of his bed, hand moving from his shoulder. Before he thinks to stop her, she yanks the collar down, revealing the start of the ropy scar from Loki’s staff. “You did die.”

It’s not a question, but Phil nods anyway. “I did. For--I don’t know how long. They lied to me.”

“SHIELD lies? Tell me something new.” Romanoff presses a thumb to the edge of the scar. “Was your love for Barton a lie, or did you not think it was reciprocated?”

“I never--”

Romanoff’s hand darts up, knife quick, to grasp his chin. “I am no child,” she snaps in Russian. “You would not have been together if I had not thought it was acceptable for either of you, or for my bird, so do not think to lie to me.”

Phil lets out a slow breath. It’s not that he hadn’t thought Romanoff knew, but they had never talked about it. “I never told him.”

“He knew, or he thought he did. He held on to that love, until he found out that you were alive the whole time and simply never told him.”

Phil is reluctant to say this, but SHIELD is gone, Fury is fuck knows where, and he doesn’t owe them allegiance anymore. They took his child from him, even if they did it unknowingly. He doesn’t owe them anything. “Fury wouldn’t permit me contact, and he had me under fairly tight monitoring. I wonder now if he thought you would ask too many questions, and that was why he kept me away from you. I don’t know. And it had been long enough that I--I assumed he would have moved on. Without the memory of Annie, there were fewer ties, fewer reasons for him to stay once I was gone.”

Romanoff releases his chin with a decisive nod. “You were still wrong, but I will forgive you.”

She stands and turns to leave, but Phil grabs her wrist. When she turns back to look at him, he asks, “Annie--has she been okay?”

“Would you be okay if you had lost her and were not able to see her body, to see your face one more time?”

Phil’s throat closes at the thought. He lost his child, he thinks, he lost his child and didn’t even know it, and he could have lost her forever, all knowledge of her just out of his reach without him even knowing to grab for it. But she had remembered him, had remembered that he was gone, had lost him in truth, and he doesn’t know which is worse.

“I’m sorry.”

“I will forgive you,” Romanoff says again.

\--

Annie doesn’t want to let him go. Phil can tell that, even as she’s pretending to be okay with the half inch of distance between them on the couch, her fingers digging into his wrist until it’s just on the edge of pain.

As gently as he can, Phil tugs her towards him, tucking her under his arm and leaning her against him. Annie goes without protest, curling up against his side. He presses his lips to the back of her head, startling when he feels a small raised scar at the back of her head.

“What’s this from?” he asks, lifting a hand to trace it. It’s only an inch or so in length, small enough he would have missed it if he hadn’t touched it directly.

Annie stiffens, and then all of the tension runs out of her and she lets out a small sigh. “I was kidnapped when Stark was presumed dead. They’re dead and I’m fine, you don’t need to freak out. Clint and Tasha got me out as soon as they knew.”

Phil wants to freak out, no matter what she says, but he knows it won’t be helpful, so he forces his voice calm to ask, “Why did they take you?”

Annie laughs. “They thought I was Stark’s kid, of all things. Thought he would pay ransom, or Pepper would.” She turns to look at him. “You’re going to leave again, aren’t you?”

“I--” Phil wants to say no, to get that look off of her face, but he can’t lie to her. “I have to. No matter how rotted SHIELD was, there are things that need to get done, and I’m one of the only people left.” He kisses her forehead. “I want you to meet my team, if you want to. So you know--you know I’m working with good people.”

“No one’s as good as Clint and Tasha.”

“They’re pretty good, though.”

Annie looks away again. “Can you fix things with Clint? I can’t--I can’t be between you, and you’re my dad but so is he, and I need you to be okay.”

As much as Phil hates that she had to find a new father figure, he’s glad it was Clint. “I’ll do my best,” Phil promises. Not just for her, though he wants to do it for her. But for himself as well, to try to find something like what he had again. “Now come on. Come meet my team, or at least part of it.”

They find FitzSimmons and Triplett in one of Stark’s half-dozen mini-kitchens, directed there by JARVIS--who seems to prefer Annie to Phil, being passive aggressive in the way that only a sentient house-controlling AI can be, by taking noticeably longer to respond to all of Phil’s queries than Annie’s. The three of them are eating what seems to be some sort of mid-afternoon snack, though Simmons is more picking at her food than actually eating it, and Triplett looks particularly engrossed by his cup of coffee.

Simmons’s head pops up when Phil and Annie walk in, and she’s out of her seat before Fitz and Triplett get a chance to react. “Sir, you look...better.”

“Thank you,” Phil says, smiling at her. “All three of you. I know it’s been hard, not knowing what’s going on.”

“Mr. Stark’s been letting us talk to his AI,” Fitz says. “And he said he might let us into one of the labs later, if we’re good.”

“How are you doing, sir?” Triplett asks, standing as well. Fitz stands a second later, fidgeting with his plate.

“I’m doing well.” Phil tightens his arm around Annie’s shoulders, then says, “I want all of you to meet my daughter, Annie.”

Simmons squeaks. “Your daughter?”

Annie waves. “Hi.”

FitzSimmons seem frozen, but Triplett smiles, reaching out a hand for her to shake. Annie takes it, shaking briefly. “Antoine Triplett,” he says. “Nice to meet you.”

“You’re Gabe Jones’s grandson, aren’t you?”

Triplett blinks at her, then laughs. “She is your daughter, that’s for sure.”

“Sorry, was that a secret?”

“No, just not used to people outside of SHIELD picking that up quite so fast.”

Annie smiles. “I grew up knowing more about the Howling Commandos than my own grandparents. I would have been remiss if I missed who you were related to.” She looks over at Phil. “Go talk to Clint. I want to talk to your team on my own.” She hesitates. “He’s in the gym.”

Phil wants to stay with her, with  _ his daughter _ , but he knows that she’s right, so he heads out of the room and down the hall, asking, “JARVIS, where’s the gym?”

JARVIS doesn’t respond, and then Stark’s voice says, “He’s pissed at you.”

Phil looks behind him, then turns around entirely to face Stark, who’s standing a few feet away from him, hands jammed into the pockets of his very expensive suit pants. “I guessed that.”

Stark stares at him for a moment, then says, “You should be proud of your kid. She took her parent being killed way better than I managed.”

Stark’s decline into alcoholism following the death of his parents is well documented, even outside of SHIELD servers. “You helped with that.”

Stark snorts. “No, I didn’t. I’m glad you’re not dead, Agent. If you pull shit like this again, what you’re going to get from me will not be a very expensive doctor.” With that, he turns and walks away.

It’s only when Stark is out of sight that JARVIS says, “I will direct you to the gym, Agent Coulson.”

\--

Barton is shooting arrows when Phil finds him, the targets too far away for Phil to see how tight his grouping or how accurate his aim is. Phil doesn’t doubt, though, that he’s shooting true.

Phil waits, just watching him, and finally Barton stops, knuckles gripped tight on his bow as he says, “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Annie wants us to talk.”

Barton’s back stays rigid, his body turned entirely away from Phil so Phil can’t see his face, and then in one breath he turns to stare at Phil. “What I don’t get,” he says, “is why. Even without Annie, even before I ever met Annie, we were friends. We were close. Why did you think I would just stop giving a fuck the second I thought you were gone?”

“Barton--”

" _ Why _ ?"

"Because you weren't there," Phil snaps. "Because you could have come to fucking Ta-Tahiti for me, and you weren't there, and I figured you must not give a fuck."

Clint's face is open, shocked and dumbstruck and so many more things that Phil doesn't know if he knows how to read anymore. "But you knew we didn't know," Clint says.

"Eventually." Phil swallows. "Eventually. But by then, I--things are so fucked up in my head, and I--you didn't care. My brain told me you didn't care, and I believed it. I'm sorry. I never meant to hurt you."

Clint stares down at his hands, his beautiful scarred hands. "I'm not giving Annie up," he says finally. "She's my kid too now."

Phil's throat closes, and he's so damn in love. "She's always been a little bit your kid."

"It's more than a little bit now." Clint looks up to meet his eye. "I'm serious, I will live in your fucking house if that's what it takes to keep her as my kid. I will break in no matter how many times you change the lock--"

"Okay."

"--or climb through the--okay?"

"Live in my house. I'll still be gone a lot, and I--did you really think I would argue against you taking care of Annie? I trust you above all else." Phil looks at Clint until Clint makes eye contact with him; he needs to make sure this sticks. "Regardless of anything else, regardless of what else has happened, I trust you. If I didn't, you never would have gotten anywhere near Annie."

"Fury never knew about her."

"No," Phil says. "He didn't."

\--

"Did you kiss and make up?"

Clint laughs. "I never kiss and tell, baby bird, you know that."

"Am I getting a new little sister or brother? I always wanted a little brother."

" _ Annie _ ." Her dad presses a kiss to Annie's forehead as he sits down on the arm of the couch. "I was going to ask if you've done your homework, but I realized the real question is, dare I ask, are you actually going to school?"

Annie smiles through the pain of the thought that her dad didn't even know what school she going to anymore. "Stark wanted to send me to some sixty-thousand-dollars-a-year private school, but I bargained him down to a regular private school." Annie grins at him. "And when have I ever not find my homework?"

"When you were up too late watching Netflix, when you decided playing violin was more interesting than reading Things Fall Apart, when you snuck out to the rink because it was having a theme night. Would you like me to go on?"

"No, no, I'm good." Annie leans her head against his side, and he wraps his arm around her shoulders. "Are you staying for a bit?"

The hesitation tells her everything she needs to know, but it still hurts to hear him say, "There's so much work, and I--"

"Yeah." Suddenly, viscerally, Annie doesn't want to hear it. "Okay. Yeah, I get it."

"I'm sorry."

"No, you're not."

"Baby bird." Clint touches Annie's face, turning it so she's looking at him. "Your dad isn't leaving you, okay? This is him going somewhere else, but always, always, it's you he's coming home to."

Annie looks away. "Until he doesn't."

"You can't think that way," Clint tells her. "Things can happen anywhere, and your dad making things safer, he's making things safer for you. For everyone. For himself, too, so he can come home to somewhere safe, where you are."

"Where both of you are." Her dad moves off the couch to crouch down in front of her, taking her hands in his. "I'm sorry, Annie. That I forgot, that we lost that time, that I have to leave again. But I promise you that I will be as safe as I can so I can come home to you."

Annie chews on her lip, then says, "I'm going to use you dying on me as an excuse not to do things. You know that, right?"

Her dad reaches up and ruffles her hair, ignoring her squawk of surprise. "I would expect nothing less, baby bird. I taught you well."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That took like 6.5 months longer than expected, but at least it's finally done now.


End file.
